Category Archives: Mountain Biking

Steve “Doom” Fassbinder is a bad-ass adventurer who combines mountain biking, rock climbing, and pack rafting to explore deep into desert, mountain, and coastal wilds. His trips require the sort of endurance and suffering that tend to either leave you in awe or scratching your head wondering why. Steve and I talked about his motivations to keep pushing his personal limits, as well as how he got into this sort of adventuring in the first place, his proudest moments, balancing risk and reward, teaching the next generation of adventurers, and a whole lot more.

Joey Schusler is a pro mountain biker, skier, and filmmaker who’s made films about bikepacking and backcountry ski adventures in Peru, Mexico, Colorado, and elsewhere. His latest short The Trail to Kazbegi, documents a bikepacking trip through the Caucasus Mountains in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. It is pure adventure porn filled with amazing trails and even more amazing mountains. Give it a watch.

The Tour Divide is a 2,745 bikepacking race from Banff, Canada to the Mexican border in Antelope Wells, New Mexico along the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route. When Eszter Horanyi set the women’s course record of 19 days, 3 hours in 2012, she did so by averaging over 140 miles each day and sleeping just a few hours each night. Doing so on repeat for the better part of a month is a brutal challenge that pushes athletes to their mental and physical limits. It turns out Horanyi is really good at it. Over her years of bikepacking racing, she’s held or still holds records on the Tour Divide, Arizona Trail Race 300, Colorado Trail Race, Arrowhead 135, and plenty more. She stopped racing in 2013, but continues to explore mountains and valleys and remote roads by bike. I spoke to Horanyi about her entry into mountain bike racing, her bikepacking racing “career,” the self-empowerment the comes from adventuring alone, the growth of bikepacking, and more.

Adventurer, author, and filmmaker Alastair Humphreys just produced this excellent short film about mountain biking to Scottish bothies, old abandoned farmhouses now used as shelter by hikers, climbers and bikers. Part ode to adventure, part history of the bothey, the video is well worth a watch. Learn more about Alastair in his fall 2014 interview with The Bicycle Story.

For most people, riding bikes in second grade meant cruising around on park sidewalks with friends. For Ellen Noble, it meant lining up against adults in her first mountain bike race. It helps explain how, at just 19, she’s a professional cyclist with two cyclocross and two mountain bike national titles and nearly a dozen UCI podiums and wins to her name.

Though she’d been making a splash for a few years as a prominent elite junior, it was just last season that Noble had a major breakthrough and established herself as one of the strongest racers in the pro women’s field. She credits much of that success to joining the JAM Fund cycling team, the nonprofit development squad founded by Jeremy Powers, Alec Donahue, and Mukunda Feldman. I spoke to Noble about her early days racing with her parents, her development into a professional, JAM Fund’s successful development program, the difficulties of being a teenage pro athlete, and much more.